TextEdit and the relief of simple software

[al_borland]

For those who may be unaware, Text Edit also handles plain text.

    Format -> Make Plain Text

Or if you want that as your default:

    TextEdit -> Settings -> Format -> Plain Text

I’ve seen many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit. So I spread this information every time I have the excuse.

Plus, plain text will likely outlive RTF. My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.

[QuantumNomad_]

> many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit

macOS also comes with vim btw.

Open terminal and then run vim from there.

Or use ed. macOS has ed also. And as we know, ed is the standard text editor.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

[xyzzy_plugh]

I do this so religiously that when I'm setting up a new system I am always surprised that rich text is the default.

TextEdit is pretty great.

[jesse__]

I would think you should reasonably be able to open those files with a regular text editor (vim comes to mind) and manually extract the contents .. right? I guess if there was disk corruption and that produced an invalid UTF8 stream then maybe not .. but that'd at least be a smoking gun pointing to corruption, versus nobody being able to read the files anymore..

[Wowfunhappy]

Assuming it was disk corruption, as seems likely, it's not immediately obvious to me why plain text would have been any better?

[Razengan]

It feels anachronistic how something simple like Markdown wasn't an standard rich text formatting er format before the various opaque ones that caught on.

Like how computers went straight for windowed GUIs even during the early era of limited resources before the fullscreen-only UI that the iPad brought.

[giancarlostoro]

Probably Disk Corruption, my wife's 2008 Macbook has RTF files that still open, even on newer macs (after copying them), on Linux and Windows.

[thaumasiotes]

> My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.

It's a simple format. Put them in a hex editor and you should be able to extract the text.

[saagarjha]

Note that TextEdit will put curly quotes in your document if you let it

[jama211]

Tbf it’s kinda on apple that this isn’t obvious, I’ve used Mac’s for 20 years and this is the first I’ve heard of this. But not a big deal of course.

[crossroadsguy]

After using SubEthaEdit, BB and what not for almost 9 years on mac now I finally thought one day that there might be N option in Text Edit to make it plaintext and there it was. Now I just use it. One of the most icky mac moments have been whenever a text file opened in textedit in its default behaviour and then I had to change “opens with” for that file.

[ravetcofx]

Try opening them in Libreoffice, it's often able to open crusy old documents.

[vlark]

Everyone making recommendations for other apps is missing the fact that the article is aimed at non-techies who aren't going to fire up a terminal or go searching for a plain-text, non-stylized text editor. TextEdit can save as plain text as other posters note, but most non-techies want a word processor where they can change fonts and font styles.

While I do like TextEdit, I prefer Bean (https://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html), which has been my quick word processor of choice on the Mac since the Tiger days.

[jama211]

Well said, and anyone who cares enough about text editing enough to notice is the kind of user capable of finding one (and probably having opinions on their favourite one, so apple couldn’t please everyone with a text editor anyway).

[CharlesW]

Also, don't sleep on the tragically underappreciated Pages.

[hbn]

I figured something like this didn't need to be stated but then Microsoft added Copilot to Notepad

No this is not a joke. Notepad has a giant always-present Copilot button now

[andai]

When I heard they rewrote Notepad in JavaScript I knew we had entered the End Times...

[3eb7988a1663]

Which is extra frustrating because I recall reading a Microsoft apology about how they could not easily add support for different line endings to Notepad. The software is so entrenched that they are terrified to edit it. Which, fine, maybe that is sort of justifiable, but seems like something that Microsoft has the resources to test.

A few years later, AI slop gets embedded into everything, reasonableness or performance be damned (the new Notepad is embarrassingly slow to launch with multiple visual glitches).

[card_zero]

They put it in Paint, too. That's when I rediscovered Irfanview.

[politelemon]

Apple has added it to textedit too with their equivalent intelligence enabled. You're throwing shade in the wrong direction.

[LeoPanthera]

I'd like to highly recommend CotEditor: https://coteditor.com

It's open source, fully Mac native, no Electron, fast, and small. I use it almost every hour of every day.

[maratc]

Coteditor is cool, but it's not TextMate though :(

[replwoacause]

This may be my most used software. It’s indispensable.

[ioblomov]

https://archive.ph/YvSxS

[dchest]

Ackchyually, TextEdit now has built-in AI as any other native macOS textview control if Apple Intelligence is turned on. It even autocompletes your sentences.

It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.

[frizlab]

> It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.

Like any (most) actual native macOS applications.

[lapcat]

TextEdit has actually become super buggy since Apple switched to TextKit 2. There are now so many drawing and editing glitches, it's frustrating. I've switched over to using BBEdit for a lot of plain text editing that I used to do in TextEdit.

[frizlab]

TextKit 2 is a disappointment tbh

I hope they’ll do a TextKit 3 that will use modern design patterns…

[renegdn]

I really want to like TextEdit, but I find the margins and default styles unbearable. It just doesn't feel very inspiring to write anything there.

I built https://blank.page/ to have a dead-simple page to write on the web. It’s like the more minimalist brother of TextEdit, but from a different mother (the browser, instead of MacOS), if that makes sense...

[prvc]

>The best way to reclaim our digital experiences, though, might be to stick with the likes of TextEdit, software that is unable to do anything except follow our commands.

Man, if he only knew...

[fortylove]

<this comment doesn't really add anything, but thought I'd share anyways for whatever reason>

I forgot the editor (maybe TextMate?) that was in vogue during the peak of the Ruby on Rails era, but there was such a feeling of magic to using what was a fairly basic editor that still had syntax highlighting.

Was this feeling of magic purely because I was younger? Or perhaps we did peak in terms of the ergonomics of human-controlling-machine without too many aids?

Fighter pilots used to fly with skill and instincts, but now are assisted by all sorts of high tech equipment that has removed much of the "flying skill" and replaced it with "equipment skill". It's not that fighter pilots are worse now. I'm sure they are better at achieving the outcomes desired, while commanding much more complex equipment. But the perhaps the art of flying is less emphasized.

In the same way, perhaps the era of software engineering is changing too?

[kayodelycaon]

(It 's TextMate. RIP)

This is a case of "everything old is new again".

A lot of this is new to the open source world. Proprietary systems have had this for decades. In a lot of ways, the stuff we use for things like javascript are a huge step downwards from the tooling available for Java, C#, and Visual Basic.

Visual Studio is an absolutely incredible piece of software. Two decades ago, you could drag and drop GUIs. You could write callback functions on buttons and never see the any of the code around that. You could write entire programs this way.

Vibe coding has existed since visual basic for applications escaped from the deep dark depths were it was wrought. If we want to go back further, look at fourth generation languages–the unholy realm where SQL came from. ;)

What we are seeing is wider adoption of old ideas. That wider adoption may be sufficient to cause a new era of engineering.

[jonnyysmith]

TextMate is also nice since it has left file browser which comes handy and preserves last open file/folders in the view.

[skinnymuch]

Rmate is really nice to open remote files locally in Textmate.

[Doctor_Fegg]

My favourite Mac app for over 20 years.

I used to edit a news-stand magazine: every article that went into the magazine was subbed with TextEdit. All my daily notes are in TextEdit. My todo lists are in TextEdit. If I'm writing longform for the web I draft in TextEdit and then copy and paste.

It's just so immediate. Write, save. WYSIWYG formatting in the way the Mac has always done it.

The author says "It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does". I think it changed its interface once, c. 2005. Before then you could just have a window with no chrome whatsoever, just a blank slate to write in. Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline. That pissed me off for a while. But compared to the ongoing hurt of 25 years of a broken spatial Finder, I can cope with it.

Thank you, whoever in Apple maintains TextEdit.

[_wire_]

For those on Mac with Linux leaning, BBEdit in free mode will endlessly please you with all the great text stuff it can do and it's excellent UI. What a great program.

Plaintext only, no RTF.

Good programmers support for many languages.

[h4ch1]

Been using Microsoft Edit [0] for a good while on my Mac (the homebrew formula got merged recently [1])

No syntax highlighting, but I love it for taking notes and maintaining my .plan files. The simple TUI interface is oddly calming

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/225837

[stblack]

TextEdit pet peeve: closing an empty window prompts the save dialog. Always.

An empty TexEdit window with a non-dirty buffer should just disappear upon close.

But I'm ready to learn otherwise from the HN commentariat.

[alain94040]

Just tried: open TextEdit, new document (creates an empty document). Close it, no save dialog.

[DavidPiper]

Happens for me too. I assume it's an iCloud thing (I vaguely remember the behaviour changing around the time I set up iCloud years ago), but I haven't ever bothered trying to figure out a way to turn it off...

[nh2]

Just two days ago my friend an I lost 5 minutes trying to disable line wrapping in TextEdit. We failed.

https://superuser.com/questions/80896/how-to-disable-line-wr...

Opinions there:

> I don't think textedit is designed to be much more than demoware.

[naet]

Long before I got into programming I would pop into windows notepad whenever I wanted to type something for myself. The bare window is oddly comforting and helps me get into a flow state of writing, brainstorming, or whatever.

I heard on newer windows versions it has copilot though which is crazy to me...

[krackers]

TextEdit is actually open source. I'm surprised no one has made a TextEdit++.

[Wowfunhappy]

Fwiw the last open source release was for 10.9, good for my purposes but probably older than what most would want.

[MathMonkeyMan]

All I need is notepad and paint, but I work on a Mac and daily drive a Gnome so I use TextEdit/gedit and GIMP. LibreOffice for presentations and spreadsheets, the few that I create.

[danielfalbo]

What about vim

[GuB-42]

Vim is far from simple no matter how you put it. It is tens of MB, plenty of features and a steep learning curve.

I think a better fit would be nano. Smaller and easier to use than vim.

Now, even nano is not that small, if you want small and you like vim, you have vi (not vim), like the version included in Busybox.

[FredPret]

I grew to like vi after thousands of unpleasant exposures, but I'd like to see the day the New Yorker writes about vim at all, nevermind about how simple it is to use

[Koshkin]

IDK vim and emacs are probably not for everyone, they are like the "higher math" of editing...

[alfalfasprout]

This x100. While I do use AI in (Neo)vim it's not built in and you can take it or leave it. And even when you do choose to use it it's on an as-needed/wanted basis.